The Kingston Fury Renegade "Heatsink" is essentially the same drive as the Kingston KC3000 and the Kingston Fury Renegade. The only difference is that a beefy heatsink has been added, compared to the KC3000, the overprovisioning is a bit bigger, too. Doesn't sound spectacular? It doesn't have to. All these three drives are built using the Phison E18 controller, which is one of the fastest SSD controllers available at this time. For NAND flash, Kingston decided to stay with the highly-popular Micron 176-layer 3D TLC—can't go wrong with that. As expected for a high-end drive, a DRAM cache is included, too.

Overall synthetic performance results are very impressive, the Fury Renegade claims a top spot in all our tests. No doubt, Phison made sure their controller performs great in these workloads that are run on a nearly empty drive, the way most reviewers test their SSDs. That's why our real-life testing is so important—it runs actual applications and games, which are much harder to optimize for. Our real-life testing is also performed with 80% of the drive filled, which is a more realistic scenario and limits the drive in the way it uses its pseudo-SLC cache.

The real-life performance is fantastic, too. The Kingston Fury Renegade is able to beat the Samsung 980 Pro with a tiny 1% margin. It is able to match the WD Black SN850, and the Hynix Platinum P41 / Solidigm P44 Pro (same drive) are just 1% ahead. In real-life you'll never notice any difference between these drives—they are all blazing fast. Compared to PCIe 3.0 SSDs, the performance uplift is around 10%, value-M.2 drives are up to 20% slower and SATA SSDs are 30-50% behind.

Just like all other modern TLC drives, the Kingston Fury Renegade comes with an SLC cache that absorbs incoming writes at high speed, but uses three times the storage to do so. Our testing reveals that the SLC cache is sized at 680 GB, which is the maximum that's theoretically possible on a 2 TB SSD (680 GB x 3 = 2040 GB). Even when the SLC cache is exhausted, write speeds are still excellent at over 1.5 GB/s. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at 2 GB/s, which is a fantastic result that's better than nearly all drives available on the market. If you plan on regularly writing tons of data, then the Kingston Fury Renegade will be an excellent workhorse for such tasks.

Kingston did a great job with their included heatsink. It comes preinstalled, just plop the drive into your PC or PlayStation 5 and you're good to go. In our worst-case thermal testing, we couldn't get the drive to throttle at all, which is fantastic news. The Phison E18 controller is well-known for its high heat output. On the KC3000 the drive started throttling after just 60 seconds of getting hit with non-stop writes—the Fury Renegade Heatsink, which is the same drive under the hood, ran through 600 seconds of the same test without any hint of throttling—good job, Kingston!

The 2 TB version of the Kingston Fury Renegade sells for around $220, which is a $15 increase over both the KC3000 and the Kingston Fury Renegade without heatsink. No doubt, you can find an aftermarket heatsink for sub-$10, but it doesn't come preinstalled and with full warranty. That's why I think Kingston's pricing isn't unreasonable, even though it's a bit steep. I'm seeing strong competition from the Samsung 980 Pro ($210) and the Solidigm P44 Pro ($200). Both these drives don't come with a heatsink, but they don't need one, due to a more energy-efficient controller design. The WD Black SN850X with heatsink currently sells for $250, the version without heatsink goes for $230, it's really not needed either on that SSD. It seems these drives only have the heatsink option for the PS5 compatibility. Out of all these options I would probably buy the one that's cheapest, which will depend on regional availability, too. There's lots of other drives out there using the Phison E18 controller with 176-layer Micron TLC NAND. Basically the only thing that sets them apart, besides price, is their cooling. As mentioned before, Kingston did a great job with the heatsink on the Fury Renegade, so if you feel you want to keep temps down on your drive, then definitely consider the Fury Renegade Heatsink.